It's not as complicated as it sounds. All you need is a system other people can understand and, most importantly, trust.

Here's a nightmare scenario shared by some mainstream investors, goldbugs and Ron Paul devotees: The year is 2013. Inflation has the U.S. economy in a stranglehold. International investors are fleeing to the far corners of the globe. The dollar is in a free fall, and Americans are scurrying to protect their wealth. What do you do?

Start your own currency.

It sounds complicated, but really it's as simple as three steps. First, amass a bank of stuff. Let's say gold. Second, decide on a sensible unit for your new currency. Let's say one "Derek Dollar" token is worth a gram of gold. Third, convince a critical mass of people to use it so that "Derek Dollars" are redeemable not just within my group of friends, but among shops and merchants around the world. Voila, we've got our own private currency.

No gold? No problem. The easiest way to start a currency is to draw up an I.O.U. system that allows your friends to trade hours of work. Hundreds of shops in Ithaca, NY, accept "Ithaca HOURs," a local currency backed, not by gold, but by man-hours. I spend an hour mowing an Ithaca lawn and receive a paper note for one HOUR. I walk to the barber's, hand him the piece of paper, and he cuts my hair. Now my neighbor's grass is shorter, my hair is kempt, and my barber is one HOUR richer. And it's all thanks to transactions that might not have happened were it not for a private currency.

The success of Ithaca HOURS shows you don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to see the virtue of private currencies. Maybe you want to create a new revenue stream that stays within your community (see right). Maybe you see a currency shortage and want a new way to grease exchanges. Maybe you want to buy goods in a virtual world like Second Life. Or maybe you want a fast, frictionless currency and you've found thousands of consumers who want the same thing.

WHAT MAKES MONEY WORK?

U.S. dollars, like most modern money, are backed by a promise, not a metal. Rather than support the currency with towers of gold bricks, Washington issues the currency by "fiat," or by decree. The good news about fiat is it allows us to create more money -- trillions more --when the economy tanks. The bad news is that, like any promise, fiat currency relies on the faith of its users and investors. The history of fiat currencies is a mixed bag of century-long successes and infamous failures, from ancient China to modern Zimbabwe where inflation hit 90 sextillion percent in 2008. (Yes, that's sextillion. With 21 zeros.)

But how can a government-backed Zimbabwe currency be utterly worthless, while a pixelated pile of gold on the game World of Warcraft can be worth more than the computer screen that creates the pixels?

One clue to the answer lives in one of the most common words for money: credit. It comes from "credo," the Latin for "I believe." Money is all about trust. It's doesn't particularly matter whether your currency is backed by something concrete (like gold), something specific (like hours of labor) or something invisible (like a government's promise to accept that money as payment for taxes). What matters is that people agree to accept it in exchange for goods and services.

"Imagine that we are on a gold standard and a severe drought hits," economist Nick Blanchard explained to me in a useful example. "Suddenly water is in extremely high demand relative to gold, and everyone would be happy to rid themselves of bullion for water. Would you say that the dollar derives its value from gold, or the fact that people will accept it to buy water? The gold price of water is a floating exchange rate as much as is the dollar price of yen."

"The real value of any currency comes from the reasonable assumption that when you demand goods and services, the paper/metal/lint/whatever in your pocket will be accepted in exchange for that thing," he continued. "Currency loses all its value when people no longer want it in exchange for what you want."

AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS

Architects of private currencies face a chicken-egg challenge. To make a new currency popular among users, you have to sign up retailers. To make it popular among retailers, you have to sign up
users.

The most interesting currency facing this existential crisis is BitCoin, a computer-generated currency that is famously traded among a couple hundred computer geeks and merchants. "The only thing valuable about BitCoin is that there are other nerdy internet denizens that will accept it for payment for things," Blanchard said.

BitCoin is backed by neither metals nor man-hours, yet each coin is worth nearly a dollar due to demand for the scarce BitCoins that have been released among the network of users. BitCoin is currently legal and active. But some worry it could face a fate like E-Gold, the bullion-backed online currency that quickly became a favorite of global crooks and money launderers. Its founder was sentenced to house arrest.

"Anything can serve as a currency and ultimately the winners will possess the characteristics that people demand: portable, fungible, easily divisible, and reasonably scarce," said John Matonis, editor of The Monetary Future blog and an outspoken advocate for private currencies. "Coins did serve that function, but a coin cannot be jammed through a broadband connection and molecularly transported. We must evolve now."

The excitement over private currencies -- whether from the goldbug fringe, the software geeks, or the econoblogger nerds -- boils down to an old-fashioned belief in competition. Currencies are like any other good or service. Monopolies can hurt the market. Government control can breed inefficiency. Maybe we should stop worrying and learn to love the BitCoin.

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.